


Planet Claire

by Martha



Category: Stargate Atlantis
Genre: Hurt/Comfort, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2009-06-27
Updated: 2009-06-27
Packaged: 2017-10-08 21:04:50
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 7,717
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/79504
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Martha/pseuds/Martha
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>No one ever dies there<br/>No one has a head</p>
            </blockquote>





	Planet Claire

**In the Middle of Things:**

McKay took in the palm fronds, the waves breaking in the distance, the twin suns in the sky and the striped chairs arranged under a beach umbrella. Then he turned back to John. "Oh, you have got to be kidding me."

"Nope." John grinned and passed across one of the drinks he was holding. The mugs looked suspiciously like coconut shells, which just made it all the better. "Drink up!"

**Later:**

When John finally got around to examining the logs, he found to his surprise that it had only taken Dr. Zelenka twenty seconds to shut off the program. When the doors finally opened, John had to throw McKay bodily against the back of the transporter. The control panel stuttered before opening all the way, as though wary of any more hurtling bodies. McKay slid to his knees, poleaxed, and John had to step around him to reach the controls. He touched his radio to tell Keller they were on their way in, then knelt next to McKay as the doors opened again. "Hey, buddy," he said gently. "You with me?"

McKay's eyes were rimmed in red and still wet. He had been crying so hard that the delicate skin above his cheekbones was spattered with broken blood vessels. His nose was bleeding. John pulled out a handkerchief and pressed it into McKay's hand. "You want to stand up?"

McKay crumpled the handkerchief in his palm as if he had no idea what to do with it. A drop of blood ran across his lips, fell from his chin and hit his chest, running down his uniform front. John took the handkerchief back to fold it, then pressed it above McKay's upper lip. "Hold that there."

Direct commands seemed to get through. McKay obediently raised his hand to keep the handkerchief under his nose. "Good man," John said, and McKay's eyes filled once more. Even his eyelids were swollen, the skin translucent and faintly blue, his blond lashes matted together. "Aw, come on," John said, pleading. "We're out. We're OK."

Keller was running towards them. John heard the gurney squeaking behind her in the corridor, and then she dropped to her knees on the other side of McKay. "Rodney," she said carefully, turning his free hand to take his pulse. "Can you tell me where it hurts?"

McKay tugged his hand away and crossed his arm over his chest like he was trying to shield himself from the universe at large.

"Rodney?" Keller prompted.

"Out there," McKay whispered miserably, jerking his chin up. "It hurts everywhere."

**In the Beginning:**

In point of fact, all of Atlantis wasn't laid out like a hotel and convention center. It was just that her current generation of inhabitants (squatters, Rodney had been known to mutter in darker moments) were overwhelmingly from Europe and North America, and they tended to settle and work in the sections of the city that reminded them most of home. They liked individual suites. Lots of doors. Lots of privacy.

But just as typical of Atlantean architecture were were the enormous open spaces. Not just wide corridors, but rooms that stretched the length and breadth of entire buildings, or wound their way up towers like extraordinarily leisurely spiral staircases. Individual rooms were marked only by the undulations of the walls like pearls on a strand.

Of course, at the other end of the scale were the buildings honeycombed with pods, each of which could only be reached by transporter. Far too claustrophobic for the current inhabitants, though they tended to justify their distaste as a safety concern. More mysterious was the grid of rooms above one of the western piers where the walls were built of a smoothly translucent material, and the doors opened only to the sky. Rodney still thought there had to be an interior means of entrance and egress, though he had never been able to find it, while Sheppard was convinced the Ancients must have flown around them with individual jet-packs, and why hadn't Rodney found those yet? In the end, they were reduced to exploring them from a puddlejumper, tediously encumbered with safety ropes.

Rodney's favorite rooms were the laboratories which had apparently been designed to be used in zero gravity, or with gravity reversed or rotated ninety degrees. Unless they started finding ZPMs growing on trees, they would never be able to use these laboratories as they had been intended, but they gave Rodney a happy feeling all the same. Clambering over the upside down door frames reminded him of lying in bed as a small child and imagining what it would be like to walk on the ceiling.

The most tantalizing rooms of all were an uninspiring suite on the north side of the tower overlooking a waste reclamation pool, two doors down from a greenhouse that remained both half-dead and sadly overgrown after their last space flight and asteroid shower. The rooms had been off limits for years because their connection to Atlantis's power grid made no sense to anyone. Even worse, the linguists were still not certain how to translate the name of the suite, but they variously suggested such gloomy possibilities -- the Dead Pool, All Ends, Sleep-No-More -- that no further exploration had been authorized in nearly four years.

However, it only took Daniel Jackson (confined to an infirmary bed until he was well enough to be shipped home) an hour or two browsing the unsolved mysteries of Atlantean linguistics to declare, "Oh, wait a minute. It's not the 'Death Pool.' It's a lot more like the 'Space for Rebirth.' "

Rodney raised a skeptical eyebrow, although inside he could barely contain his glee. "Rebirth? I'm not sure that's any better. Don't you have to die first?"

"Only in the spirit." Daniel flashed one of his quick, sardonic grins.

Rodney was not amused. "You do not get to wave the opportunity to finally explore the Dead Pool rooms in front of my nose and then take it away again because, hello, not laughing here."

"You weren't raised by evangelicals, were you?"

"The horrors my family may have seen fit to visit upon me, although varied and terrible, at least didn't include religion."

"I just meant dying in the spirit before being reborn in the spirit. No actual death required."

"And you would know," Rodney snapped back because he seemed constitutionally incapable of not sniping at Daniel. "Can you tell what the rooms were actually used for?"

"Well, recreation, most likely. You know, holiday-making."

"The Ancients took vacations? I find that almost excruciatingly difficult to believe."

Daniel shrugged. "They never seemed particularly fun-loving to me either, but that's the translation that makes the most sense."

"Huh," Rodney said, and left immediately to go find Sheppard, who was as excited as a kid at the news. No surprise there. It was one of the things Rodney loved about him. Together they wrote up a mission protocol to present to Woolsey, who was likely to be a little nervous about authorizing expeditions to mysterious rooms right now. Their solution was to frame the mission more as routine maintenance rather than as exploration, and they succeeded so thoroughly that Rodney actually felt a little guilty. He and Zelenka were still running preliminary simulations when Woolsey authorized the mission.

Rodney finished the tests over the next three days anyway. As cool as the holodeck had been on _The Next Generation_ (and Rodney was secretly impressed that John knew the holodeck had first appeared on an episode of the animated series), no one ever used it on either show without exactly the sort of serious complications that Rodney was determined to avoid.

**Back to the Middle of Things:**

The expression on McKay's face was priceless. He clutched his coconut shell drink to his chest, fumbling with his other hand for his radio to check in with Zelenka. John leaned back in his beach chair and crossed his ankles.

"This is the best you can do?"

It took John a minute to realize McKay had stopped talking to Dr. Zelenka, and now was addressing him. "Any place and anything in the universe, Colonel, and you choose a beach? You could have just flown a puddlejumper to the mainland."

"Yeah, but there wouldn't have been piña coladas."

"Is that what this is?"

"McKay!" John protested as Rodney proceeded to pour his drink out on the sand. "It's not like it was real lime juice."

"Actually, we don't know that it isn't."

"Really?" John peered into his coconut shell with new respect. "Is that what the readings are telling Dr. Zelenka?"

"Somehow I didn't get around to asking him about the chemical composition of girl drinks in artificial realities. What he is seeing is that this room is feeding a small but measurable amount of power back into Atlantis' electrical grid."

John sat up. "Wait a minute. Us being in here is generating electricity? How is that possible?"

"Sorry. Too busy trying to avoid being poisoned by fruity umbrella drinks to figure that out."

"Dammit, this isn't funny, McKay." Dark clouds began to roil the horizon.

"Calm down, Colonel, or we'll have to terminate the experiment."

"Is the room feeding off us?"

McKay rolled his eyes, and John stopped worrying even before his exasperated dismissal. "Oh, of course, because relaxing in a vampire room would be the Ancients' idea of a vacation."

"It wouldn't be the first time we've questioned their sanity," John muttered, but it was clear he had already lost McKay, whose head was bent deeply over his tablet. John couldn't remember if McKay had brought the tablet into the rooms with him, or had wished it into existence the way John had summoned the beach itself. Either way, it could hardly be reliable from within the simulation. He considered pointing this out, but it was just so pleasant watching the waves rush up the shoreline. They rolled along the sand with the rhythm of his pulse, steady and constant, washing him along. By the time he remembered there was something he wanted to say, one of the two suns was floating on the horizon, while the other had climbed high in a bright blue sky. All the clouds were gone, and double shadows under the beach chairs crossed in a thicket of lines.

The more John looked at the shadows, the more engrossing they became. He raised his piña colada, fascinated by the soft, repeated angles of wrist and elbow. Eventually he remembered McKay and looked up with a guilty start. A path through a lush greenwood led straight into the sunrise, glowing through the early morning mist.

**Paperwork:**

The debrief with Mr. Woolsey was short as such things went, but it still seemed to take forever. The briefing was only preliminary until McKay was well enough to take part, but Dr. Zelenka's apparently inexhaustible supply of technical details rolled in like the ocean, answering all of Woolsey's questions without getting any closer to explaining why McKay was weeping like a lost soul down in sickbay. So it was more than a little disconcerting when Dr. Keller showed up as the briefing was winding down.

"Where's McKay?" John snapped. He had been unhappy enough leaving the man in such a state. He was furious to discover Keller had abandoned him too.

"At ease, Colonel Sheppard," Woolsey warned.

Keller smiled nervously, tucking her hair behind her ear. "It's all right," she said, though she was clearly grateful for Woolsey's support. "I sent Rodney to his quarters. He's fine."

"He's fine?" John repeated incredulously. "Are we talking about the man I watched have a complete hysterical meltdown not half an hour ago? And now you think he's fine?" He wished McKay were here to rattle off some cranky speculation about Keller cutting her medical degree off the side of a cereal box.

This time Keller met John's eyes looking a lot less nervous and a lot more annoyed. "Rodney was clearly agitated, but there are no physiological concerns. I gave him five mg of Zolpidem and told him not to return to work until tomorrow. He can talk to you then. Obviously, I would recommend no one return to the Dead Pool until Rodney can brief you further."

Zelenka muttered something that he didn't bother to translate.

"You have something to add?" Mr. Woolsey asked, sounding far too much like a grade school teacher.

"I believe we had reached the same conclusion," Zelenka explained, but John was pretty sure that wasn't a literal translation.

John couldn't unwind afterwards. When he came back from his evening run, he walked twice down the halls outside the living quarters to cool down, not allowing himself to knock on McKay's door either time. He was no more relaxed after his shower, so he got dressed and went back to the infirmary. He had the vague idea of talking to Jackson about his translation, but when he arrived he found McKay was already there, his voice clearly audible from the hall outside Daniel Jackson's room. So much for Keller's sleeping pills, John thought irritably.

Jackson's voice was a murmur, McKay's an explosion of short, angry exhalations. "Why didn't you tell me?" he demanded.

John couldn't hear Jackson's reply.

"How could you have missed something like that, you stupid son of a bitch?" McKay yelled back. John came around the door fast, and was just in time to see McKay haul off with a wild roundhouse punch.

Even propped up in a hospital bed, though, Jackson was far from helpless, and he caught McKay's fist in his right hand. The smack of flesh on flesh, McKay's knuckles against Jackson's palm, was loud and ugly. The IV stand came down with enough force to topple the tray table. John bellowed at McKay as he climbed around, but Jackson had already slid out of bed and forced Rodney's arm behind his back and up between his shoulders. McKay squawked and flailed as he collapsed onto the hospital bed. Jackson followed him down, keeping McKay's arm pinned.

"All I could translate was the sign on the door," Jackson gasped into his ear.

"I have a medical emergency in Dr. Jackson's room," John said into his comm. "I also need two MPs to report immediately," he continued, taking Jackson's elbow. "All right, gentlemen. Break it up."

"Rodney," Daniel Jackson said urgently, completely ignoring John. "I couldn't read anything else. You know that. _I just don't have the math._" Then he slipped to his knees, and unprepared to catch him, John had to let him go before he dislocated Jackson's shoulder. McKay immediately staggered up, and John grabbed his arms instead, determined to avoid any more violence. But McKay wasn't fighting anymore.

"Daniel?" he asked, stricken. "Oh my god. Daniel, are you all right?"

"I'm fine, " Daniel said, slowly curling into a ball on the floor. "I'm all right."

"I seem to have missed quite the fracas," Biro announced briskly from the doorway.

"Colonel Sheppard," Sergeant Molina said from right behind her, obviously trying to decide whether he should push past Biro into the room. "Reporting as ordered."

"You gentlemen can wait outside for now," Biro directed calmly. John nodded at Molina over Biro's shoulder, and he and Sergeant Critchfield moved back. "Rodney," Biro said. "Are you going to go running amuck around Atlantis if Colonel Sheppard lets you go?"

McKay snorted and shook his head. "Please," he muttered. "See to Daniel."

"Next item on my agenda," Biro agreed. "Colonel Sheppard, I believe you can release Dr. McKay now. Rodney, I would appreciate it if you would take a seat in the hallway and wait until I'm ready to examine you." She was already kneeling beside Jackson, her hand on his shoulder. "I really wouldn't have recommended these athletics," she said to him.

"I'm fine," McKay protested immediately. "I don't need --"

"It's Biro or the brig," John informed him quietly.

McKay's head jerked around, eyes wide with betrayal, but he allowed John to chivy him outside. Molina and Critchfield were standing a few yards down. "One of you find Dr. McKay a chair," John said, and both MPs rabbited into one of the nearby labs, Critchfield bearing a metal chair when they returned. McKay had his arms crossed over his chest and his chin up in defiance, but he sat down without John's having to make it an order.

"Care to explain what that was about?"

"You saw what happened," McKay grumbled.

"I saw it. I just couldn't believe it. Why did you try to slug Dr. Jackson?"

"It's not like I succeeded."

"Is there something he didn't tell us about the Dead Pool translation?"

"What are you talking about? He didn't tell us anything! Oh my god, the man who opened the stargate, and he couldn't find his way around a high school calculus formulary."

"He's linguist, McKay."

"Which isn't close to science. Christ, at best it's a simple skill set, like learning to juggle or fly a helicopter."

"Hey."

"And the SGC regularly trusts our lives to an idiot savant like that?"

"Hello again, Rodney," Biro interrupted John's response, coming out to take McKay's wrist.

"Is Daniel all right?" McKay demanded.

Biro held up her free hand to quiet him, finished counting and released his wrist before answering. "Daniel will be just fine, provided he can stop getting into fisticuffs. He tells me that he deliberately provoked you because he was bored being stuck in the bed for so long."

McKay looked at the floor. "You don't believe that."

"No, I don't. Do you have another explanation?"

McKay didn't answer, and he didn't look up. His hands were balled into fists in his lap. John so rarely saw McKay seriously angry, as opposed to just blusteringly impatient, that it took him a little while to recognize what he was seeing. "Rodney," he said, astonished.

McKay shook his head, not meeting anyone's eyes.

"Well, I don't have any reason to keep you here overnight," Biro said, though she sounded unhappy about it. "Will you stay in your room if I send you home?"

"He doesn't have a say in the matter," John put in grimly. "If you're not keeping him here, then I'm confining him to quarters for forty-eight hours. Molina and Critchfield will escort him."

"Fine." McKay got to his feet, hands still clenched at his sides.

Dr. Biro said, "Jennifer or I will be checking in on you at regular intervals. Call us before then if you need anything or aren't feeling well."

Before John allowed Molina and Critchfield to lead him away, he tried one more time. "Rodney. If there's anything you need to talk to me about--" He opened his hand, and McKay jerked huffily out of reach. Childish as it was, John still felt hurt. "All right," he said stiffly. "You'll need to set up an appointment later this week to speak to me and Mr. Woolsey before you'll be allowed to resume your duties."

McKay snorted. "Right. Unless any inconvenient emergencies crop up before then."

"That's enough, Dr. McKay," John said, heartsick, and the MPs led him away.

**Leaving Planet Claire:**

John followed the early sun through the woods. The trunks of trees pointed shadows up the trail towards John. He could hear a faint, scratching sound coming from all around, but he had already identified it as chalk on a blackboard, which for some reason seemed perfectly right and normal. The undergrowth was sensibly geometric, as were the trees themselves. As he walked deeper into the woods and the sun rose higher, John saw the ground mist was actually composed of formulae, wavering elements caught in the briars. He couldn't read much of it, but he saw enough to be reminded of McKay's work in early universe acoustic oscillations. Existence, the universe, and everything. One of Rodney McKay's happy places.

And as soon as he thought that, the mist became chalk dust on a board. John sat at the back of a gloomy classroom, nothing like the bright, cloistered spaces of his own schoolboy days. Rows of scarred and pitted desks were ranked as far as a gunmetal gray lectern at the front. Outside, long shadows reached across an empty playing field, and from much further came a muffled shout of childish play.

Far away at the front of the room, a small, skinny boy was writing on the chalkboard. That was Rodney, John thought. And then more fondly: Meredith. Despite his young age and small stature, the entire board was filled with formulae. John wondered how he had reached the top of the blackboard, which was a foot or more above the reach of his thin white arms.

As soon he thought that, Meredith became Rodney. John realized his own knees were hitting the underside of a desk that was far too small for him. He unfolded himself and walked to the front of the room. "And you complained about my beach?" he chided McKay gently. "What is this, your third grade classroom?"

McKay didn't stop writing. "Have you ever wondered why my experimental results made no sense on M5S-224?" he asked without looking at John.

"Um, no?"

McKay rolled his eyes. "The artificial reality the mist people created."

"I know what it was."

"They made me think I was examining a ZPM in a lab under the mountain, but none of the equations worked. It was like someone had rewritten the fundamental relationships of the universe."

"It was a pretty slipshod version of reality," John pointed out.  "It's not like they really understood what they found in our brains."

"I'm not talking about human brains. This should have been mechanical universe stuff! But from the Einstein tensor to Maxwell's equations, it was all complete gibberish." McKay wrote faster and faster. The stick of chalk snapped. He cursed and just kept writing.

John picked up the broken piece as it rolled across the floor and laid it in the tray. "Restating the obvious here: the mist creatures weren't very good at world building for humans. They didn't even understand the difference between living and dead friends." John was mortified to hear his voice break, but McKay didn't notice.

"Whatever. The important things worked, didn't they?"

John had to look away. "Important? I don't know what the hell you --"

"You weren't walking around on the ceiling, were you? Water was still wet, Earth's sky was blue?"

"What are you getting at?"

"I should have asked what the Ancients needed a vacation from in the first place," McKay said sadly, and the scratching chalk faltered.

John looked back, seized with an abrupt sense of dread, but McKay was nowhere to be seen. John himself was standing on the beach again. This time there were no beach chairs or tropical drinks, and the sky was mustard yellow. Storm clouds like battlements were ranked from the horizon to the heavens, and the air tasted like ozone and rain. "McKay!" John shouted, starting to run. He tried to think of sunshine and easy surf, but half a dozen or more bolts of lightening forked across the sky in quick succession, and the following claps of thunder were ear-splitting.

"Rodney!" John screamed and fumbled for his radio, yelling for Zelenka to shut it down, shut everything down as fast as he could. For an eternity nothing happened, and then John was looking at the Dead Pool suite as though it had been like this all along, the paisley floor plan, all dead-end loops and corners within corners, the walls and ceiling encrusted with mysteriously arranged crystals like colonies of  sea sponges. And in the center, curled on his knees, McKay was knotting his fingers in his hair and gasping in pain.

"Rodney, Jesus! Are you hurt?"

He wailed at the touch of John's hand on his shoulder. John finally had to haul him up bodily to get him into the transporter. "Those fucking bastards," McKay managed once, as John dragged him to his feet, and then he was crying too violently to say anything more.

**The Linguist's Confession:**

The next morning, John intercepted the MP with McKay's breakfast and delivered the tray himself. "That had better be breakfast," McKay yelled in response to John's knock.

"White toast, scrambled eggs, sausage and coffee," John said as the door opened. "I brought you some of the strawberry things from La-Bas, too, for your vitamin C."

McKay glanced up, obviously startled by John's appearance at his door, but then quickly looked back at his monitor. "I don't like them," he grumbled. "They hardly taste like strawberries at all."

"That might be because we're in another galaxy." John set the tray down on McKay's desk, picked up one of the strawberries and popped it into his mouth. "They're not bad, though."

McKay harrumphed. Reaching for the coffee cup on the tray, he drained it in three swallows. His eyes looked bruised. John decided not to ask how he had slept and gestured to the monitor instead. "What are you and Dr. Z talking about this morning?"

McKay's chin came up defensively. "He has some questions about the Dead Pool's power generation. I was looking over the readings for him."

"He's not the only person with questions," John agreed mildly. "Would I be right to assume it's still too early for some answers?"

"While I'm trapped in my quarters under house arrest? Yes, colonel. It's too early for answers."

John sighed and took another strawberry. "You're here because you thought it would be a good idea to pick a fight with a linguist last night instead of going to your quarters and getting some sleep. I don't feel even remotely sorry for you." These strawberries were actually pretty tasty. He helped himself to a third.

McKay moved the tray to the other side of the desk, out of John's reach. He also ate one of the strawberries himself. "Have you seen Daniel this morning?" he asked, starting to smear margarine on his toast. "Is he all right?"

"I'll be talking to him later to see if he wants to prefer charges. Do you want me to tell him you were asking about him? "

"No. And he won't press charges. He told Biro he was the one who started it." McKay didn't look at John as he spoke.

"That won't work either. I saw you take a swing at the man. What did he say to you?"

McKay put down his toast and started typing furiously. "No, no, no," he muttered, obviously talking to the monitor, or maybe just to himself, and not to John. "A photovoltaic model doesn't make any sense. Sheppard's head would have lit up like a thousand watt bulb."

John winced. The door chime rang and McKay yelled, "Come in!" without slowing his typing. When the door opened, Teyla stood on the threshold, Torren in a sling against her hip and a woven duffel affair on her other shoulder. "Hello, Rodney."

"Oh my god." McKay groaned and pushed himself away from the desk. "Not the mobile creature feature. You know, some of us have actual work to do."

"Indeed," Teyla agreed pleasantly. "At breakfast Jennifer mentioned you were going to be in your quarters all day. It seemed like a very good opportunity for Kanaan and I to spend time at New Athos." She deposited Torren in McKay's arms, and pulled two bottles from her bag, which she put in his refrigerator beside the desk. "We should be back before dinner."

"Oh, come on," McKay complained, though he cradled Torren against his shoulder with suspicious ease. "Don't you want to show off the incredible dirty diaper generator to the folks back home?"

"We will be assisting in a house raising for Maia and Bekand. Another babe in arms would not be helpful." Teyla pulled a tall wooden contraption John had never seen before out from behind McKay's dresser and unfolded it down into a bassinet.

"Hey," John said. "How come I didn't get one of those?"

Teyla raised an eyebrow at him in that way that always made him feel like an idiot, then reached into a bottom drawer of McKay's dresser to lift an armload of bedding, which she folded into the bottom of the cradle. McKay continued to whine about Atlantis sinking to the bottom of the ocean because a couple of Athosian newlyweds couldn't build their own damn house, all the while carefully jogging Torren in his arms. Torren still held his own head as though it were all a surprising success, and he burbled with pleasure. "The greatest mind in two galaxies, changing diapers and playing patty-cake. Imagine the loss to science because I was burping a baby instead of --"

John looked up. McKay's lips were drawn into that hard, one-sided slant, and though his eyes were on Torren, it was clear his thoughts were far away. Torren swung his arm in protest at the sudden lack of movement, and bopped McKay squarely on the nose with the flat of his chubby palm.

"Oh, very nice," McKay grumbled, turning Torren around to perch on his knee. "I can tell we're going to have a perfectly wonderful day of babysitter battery."

Teyla bent down and touched her forehead to her son's, and then pressed her forehead with equal tenderness against Rodney's. "Ronon has promised to be available if you need help. You know Kanaan and I are both very grateful."

"I can help, too," John said, but Teyla just smiled at him again.

Later in the day, John managed to run into Dr. Zelenka by setting up shop with his laptop in a mess hall alcove, and doggedly doing paperwork until Zelenka finally showed up for lunch around two in the afternoon. John stepped up beside him at the coffee urn, his own cup in hand, and said, "Hi, Radek."

"Rodney is only communicating with me today as a colleague, not as my supervisor," Zelenka replied immediately. "We both understand the concept of restricted duties, Colonel."

Well, not so much, John thought. He said, "At ease," since there was obviously no chance of doing this casually after all. "I'm not stupid enough to think I can actually get McKay to turn off his brain for a couple of days. Do you guys have anything new?"

"It will be at least a couple of days before we have anything further to report."

Subtle as a sledgehammer, Dr Z, John didn't say out loud. He did follow Zelenka back to his table, though, and sat down across from him, because he was capable of being just as bloody-minded as any of the scientists on this expedition. Zelenka raised an eyebrow and went back to cutting up his breaded pork chop.

"I'm glad McKay has baby-sitting duties today," John said. "Not so much time to sulk."

Zelenka put down his knife and fork. John took another sip of coffee and   
waited.

"I would be the last person to argue that Rodney McKay has ever suffered disappointment gracefully," Zelenka finally announced. "But you were with him in the Dead Pool rooms. Do not pretend to tell me Rodney is sulking now." Zelenka spat a word in Czech to punctuate his statement.

John didn't ask for a translation. "Something ripped his heart out in there. Yeah, I kind of got that. And I'm trusting that it doesn't endanger the city, because I'm not going to ask McKay about it again until he brings it up himself."

He simply couldn't stand to see McKay hurting like that. John figured that was clear enough without having to say it out loud.

Probably it was, because Dr. Zelenka's expression softened. He had a couple of bites of pork chop and washed them down with coffee.

"Both of us," Zelenka finally said, "Rodney in particular, but everyone in astrophysics, you know, was so very, very excited at the prospect of using the Dead Pool to perform thought experiments. The opportunity for advancements in cosmology alone--" he made an expansive gesture. "Tragically, it is obvious now that the environment is far too sensitive to human emotion. Even if we could find a way to ensure that a stray thought didn't summon hurricanes, how could we ever trust the experimental results? No. No, it is obviously unworkable. But the way the programming alerted Rodney to the problem seems to have been so unnecessarily brutal." He broke off, his eyes clouded. "I suppose we must be glad it was no worse. After all, these are the beings who gave us the ascend-or-die machine."

"We were separated during those last minutes." John prompted. "I didn't see what happened, but McKay had been talking about the mist people and the way his calculations wouldn't work. And he was writing formulae on a chalk board."

Zelenka looked interested, but he finally shrugged. "At least, that is what you saw him doing. We don't know to what extent visions are shared within that environment."

"And we won't know until McKay can complete his report."

"His report is not critical," Zelenka said sternly, as though John intended to go hassle McKay for it right this minute. "We have copious amounts of raw data yet unanalyzed. Your subjective experiences are unlikely to add much to our understanding of the mechanisms at work."

Except for the way McKay's subjective experience nearly destroyed him, John thought unhappily. He looked up and found Zelenka watching him.

"Is it true?" Zelenka asked him. "Rodney hit Daniel Jackson because he mistranslated the Ancient data about the Dead Pool rooms?"

"Well, Jackson was able to block his swing."

Zelenka shook his head.

"Afterward, McKay would only say that Jackson didn't know math. Come to think of it," John continued, "That's all I heard Jackson say, too."

"Yes. I have talked to Daniel Jackson in the past. His grasp of the most basic mathematical principles is sadly unsophisticated. There is no question we should have treated his Dead Pool translation with greater caution." Zelenka thought for a moment. "I fear I may have been swayed by his command of Czech. As fluent and idiomatic as my own _babicka_."

"I think it's time for me to speak to Dr. Jackson myself." John got to his feet. "I'm less likely to be impressed by his Czech." Which was meaner than Dr. Zelenka deserved, but it was clear all of them had been too eager to run with Jackson's translation.

He found Daniel Jackson working on the Ancient version of a treadmill, which was the first evidence John had seen today that McKay really was handing over some of his duties. The treadmill used a pinpoint time dilation field, which made it a complete energy hog, as McKay would complain loudly and at length whenever Medical had the audacity to request authorization to use it (You actually want to interrupt the space-time continuum when a pulley and an inclined plane would accomplish the exact same thing? )

Dr. Zelenka was known to be a bit more lenient where Atlantis' energy consumption was concerned.

The device held Jackson upright in what appeared to be a comfortable stride, but when John got closer, he saw the man' s brow was beaded with sweat. He was concentrating so hard on his steps that he didn't even see John until the physical therapist said, "Good afternoon, Colonel."

"Marty," John returned. "This guy keeping you busy?"

Marty Karadzic grinned. He was five foot five with shoulders that made him look as broad as he was tall. His straight black hair was cut short, his face perpetually sunburned. "Dr Jackson here? He thinks he's ready to run wind sprints. I tell him, wait until he can walk for five minutes first, then we'll see."

"Colonel Sheppard," Jackson interrupted, "Is Rodney all right?" He broke his stride, and for a moment was enveloped in a shimmer that made John's head hurt to look at him.

"OK, that's enough for today," Marty announced. He shut off the treadmill, catching Jackson when he stumbled coming out of the field. "Let's cool down with a couple of slow laps around the room. Can you handle that?"

"Yes, I'm fine," Jackson said, clearly annoyed by his weakness. Marty stayed close, but allowed him to walk without assistance.

"For a couple of guys who had to be separated yesterday, you're both awfully concerned with each other's welfare today." John said. "The first thing McKay asked when I saw him this morning was how you were doing."

"What? I'm fine. Rodney wasn't really trying to hit me."

John wasn't so convinced of that. "Dr. McKay does seem calmer today."

"Oh, that's-- I'm glad. I'm glad. I think he was very angry with me yesterday."

"Yeah, about that. Marty, would you mind giving me and Dr Jackson a minute here?"

"Nope. This conversation is already more than I want to know. Daniel, give me a call when you're ready to go back to your room."

He eased Jackson onto a chair and left them. John waited until the door closed behind him. "Are you sure you feel like discussing this now?"

Jackson leaned back heavily, sipping water from a no-spill plastic mug. "I'm not going to press charges. This whole thing was my fault."

John pulled up a chair. "I promise you, I'm the last person who wants to have Rodney McKay hauled up on charges, but I did see him doing his damnedest to punch you out. By definition, that is not your fault. "

Jackson shook his head. "I should have made sure he understood. The truth is, I didn't understand, either. It's always been a translation issue for me, and I wasn't all that surprised when physicists didn't seem to care -- when do physical scientists ever care about case morphology?"

"Not very often, I'm guessing? Look, McKay seems to think you withheld information about the Dead Pool rooms. Are you telling me he just didn't listen to you?"

"Would you expect Rodney to listen to a linguist quibbling about verbs?"

"If it concerned his life and sanity, then yes, I would expect him to shut up and actually listen for a minute or two."

"How about a question that specialists in Ancient have been arguing about for years now?"

"OK. I can see where his attention might start to wander. What are we talking about here? Something a little more serious than conjugating irregular verbs?"

Jackson smiled ruefully and lowered his head. "Actually, that's almost exactly the problem." His expression turned wistful, and he concentrated even harder on his water bottle. "Sam always thanks me for cc-ing her on my papers, but she probably isn't reading them either, is she?"

John wasn't about to get into that. "Can you tell me what McKay would have known if he had been following the work of SGC linguists for the past few years?"

"It has to do with a rare verb form, the real-universe optative mood. It's used only for things happening in the real universe."

John felt an eyebrow go up. "And this is rare? What's the more common universe?"

"Well, I think that would be the one humans actually live in. That the ascended Ancients still inhabit."

John remembered McKay complaining about equations that wouldn't work in the reality of the mist people, of the energy leak routed into the electrical grid, and he had an inkling of possibilities so monstrous that his mouth went dry. He didn't speak, simply shaking his head slowly.

"The real problem with ascension has never been how to shed the physical body, of course, but how to hang onto your distinctive self once you do. I mean, it's obvious when you think about it."

The expression on John's face must have told Jackson it wasn't entirely obvious to him.

"Look at it this way. Everything we can understand about personality, ego or individuality in this life are functions of physical and chemical processes taking place in time. Once you no longer occupy a body in time and space, who are you? Ascension may eliminate the very things you were so keen to hold onto in the first place."

John finally got it. "And that wasn't good enough for them, was it? So the Ancients cheated. Even immortality wasn't good enough for them, so they had to cheat." John buried head in his hands, then looked up again. "What did those bastards do?"

"Well, this is where you could really use an astrophysicist, but from what I understand, they jiggered the way they exist in the universe."

"Jiggered."

"Um, yeah. Rodney informed me this is one of those deals where math would come in handy. He says it looks like the Ancients didn't so much reconfigure the universe itself, as change how they interact with reality."

John spent a minute trying to get his head around the implications of that before concluding, "So it was more important for the Ancients to hang onto their individual neuroses for all eternity, than it was for them to be able to see the universe." He huffed out a shaky breath. "Not very fucking Zen of them, was it?"

"Not, uh, not so much. I've written a few papers in the last three years advancing the probability that Buddhism on Earth actually arose explicitly in opposition to the Ancients' quest for personal ascension. I don't suppose you've --"

"No. Somehow I've never had the chance to look any of those up."

"Right. Of course not. No."

John took a deep breath, dropping his head back in a futile attempt to stretch tightening muscles. "McKay wondered why those guys needed a vacation."

"The Dead Pool rooms were built hundreds of generations before the rise of the Wraith. Apparently back then, they just needed the occasional break from their own blinkered universe."

"Keeping a sliver of existence for themselves after fucking it up for everyone. Jesus."

"I know Rodney thinks I was being deliberately stupid, maybe even cruel, and maybe he's right. These days, I really try to stay away from the, uh, ontological implications where the Ancients are concerned." Jackson looked like he was on the verge of tears. "This was about conjugating some really twisted verbs."

John smiled without humor. "Never stopped to think it also meant kissing the Lambda cold dark matter model goodbye?"

Jackson's return smile was just as bleak. "It's even worse than that, isn't it? Inevitably, the better any model of our universe becomes, the more profound its shortcomings will be, too."

"Yeah. Why would McKay be upset about that?" The words escaped before John could stop them, and he could have kicked himself. Jackson sat up straighter, facing him as though waiting for John to take a swing at him, too. John had to turn away. "Don't try to take the blame, Dr. Jackson. You're not the one who did this."

John sent Marty back to him on his way out.

**Afterward (Meet Me Tonight in Dreamland):**

Propped against the outside wall of Rodney's quarters, underneath the door chime, was a tablet running a five-second video loop of Torren asleep in his bassinet. As a do-not-disturb sign, it was pretty effective.

John let himself in without knocking and found Torren sleeping as advertised. McKay was sitting in bed with a laptop, and he scowled when he saw John. He slid off the bed, and with a curt gesture, motioned John to follow him out onto the balcony. The sky was just beginning to darken towards sunset, and one of the moons had already risen.

"You've been talking to Jackson," he accused John immediately.

"Yeah. He's concerned about you."

A snort. "You're probably concerned about me too, now that you know I couldn't handle finding out we're just cuckoos in the Ancients' giant clock. Was that really any reason for me to break down like -- like --" McKay's voice began to waver, and he turned away quickly.

John had no idea how to help.

After a moment, McKay started again. "So theoretical astrophysics is nothing but jacking off to the Hubble constant in a cosmological closet. You know what? Fine. That's just fine. It's not like it really changes the important things."

Except for the way it absolutely does, John thought. After the silence had gone on as long as he could stand, he put his hand on McKay's shoulder and pulled him around. McKay's cheeks shone with tears. He shrugged, embarrassed, and wiped his face with the back of his hand.

"On the plus side," McKay began at last. His voice cracked, so he started again. "On the plus side, it has always pissed me off that eleven-dimensional supergravity doesn't make sense at high energy. "

"There you go," John agreed softly. He didn't allow himself to think anymore, and cupping Rodney's chin in his hand, he tilted Rodney's face towards him, and touched his lips to Rodney's temple. When he let go, Rodney leaned back and stared at him, goggle-eyed.

John licked his lips and tasted the salt of Rodney's tears.

"You," Rodney said. "You."

"Me," John agreed. He could hardly hear his own voice over the thunder of his heart.

"I don't believe you! You couldn't have done that after one of the many times I actually saved the day? You wait until now?"

"Um. Sorry?"

"What kind of an answer is that?" Rodney squawked in exasperation.

"Not a very good one," John admitted. This time he kissed Rodney's lips, slippery bitter with tears. The kiss lasted until Torren awoke, a puzzled whimper progressing to a wail.

"There's no such thing as Edward Witten, and I'm babysitting." Rodney trotted to the bassinet and scooped Torren into his arms. "With a sense of timing like that," he told Torren seriously, "You have to wonder how the Colonel ever gets a date."

Torren stared back at Rodney, his left foot kicking randomly. His head wobbled. "What do you bet the next thing he does is invite me to spend a day at the beach? He'll probably even try to give me a piña colada."

At Rodney's mock growl, Torren gave a shivery burble of laughter. The sweet, open sound floated out the balcony door, towards an imperfect moon, and John looked up to see all the stars of heaven suspended from a sky of brittle, construction-paper blue.


End file.
